When the employees found it in front of them, on a screen, like before theirs death they were stunned: their former boss Tang Xiao'ou, who passed away in December, was talking to them again as if he had come back to life. This is not a joke or the disguise of who knows who but it is thanks to theartificial intelligence that has “resurrected” the founder of the Chinese group SenseTime. The deceased gave a full speech as a “digital” human being. “Hello everyone, we meet again finally. Last year was tough, but 2024 will give us satisfaction”, were the first words.
How can you come back to life
Many employees were initially convinced that Tang Xiao'ou's speech had been recorded by the IT billionaire before his death, but when the digital human spoke about Yolo, a film released in February, they realized that the speech must have been for latest strength. “The act represents a technological breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence and has sparked discussions about life, death and the ethics of technology“he told the Chinese newspaper Yicai Luan Qing, general manager of a division of the company's digital space business group based in Hong Kong. The digital man based entirely on Tang created an almost realistic impression even in the details thanks to innovations in the language model used. “It was not easy to create the model as the team spent a lot of time researching different materials of Tang's voice, using three or four seconds of each tape to train and optimize the model,” General Manager Qing pointed out.
Costs
To create a kind of avatar and resurrect the missing person you love most, you will have to spend a negligible sum: for just 20 yuan, the equivalent of 2.50 eurosyou can acquire the clone of the deceased according to some IT services of China. The news arrives precisely in the days in which the country is celebrating its dead as happens here in November. There are already numerous mourners and rather technological people who have turned to artificial intelligence to communicate with the deceased who have miraculously reappeared on a smartphone, PC or tablet.
A growing market
This business is already worth around 12 billion yuan (the equivalent of 1.5 billion euros). The interest in digital clones of the dead comes as China's artificial intelligence industry continues to expand, with revenues likely to quadruple by 2025. Among the reasons pushing the Chinese in the direction of creating digital humans is the desire to have avatars available 24 hours a day capable of sponsoring and advertising products.
Xinhua, a state news agency and voice of the Communist Party, has also turned in this direction, having created a TV presenter who is the result of artificial intelligence and who does not need to rest, change clothes or ask for pharaonic contracts for his work. but only someone who writes him what he will have to say.